Hungary’s 2010 election brought to power a Fidesz parliamentary supermajority led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In just two years, they have fundamentally changed the constitutional order of Hungary. The current government now has very few checks on its own power, but the new constitutional order permits the governing party to lodge its loyalists in crucial long-term positions with veto power over what future governments might do. As a result, the Fidesz government has achieved a remarkable constitutional feat: giving themselves maximum room for maneuver while simultaneously entrenching their power, their policies and their people for the foreseeable future.
About the Authors
Miklós Bánkuti
Miklós Bánkuti is senior research specialist at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. She has worked on Hungarian constitutional law since the 1990s and is the author of the 2022 Journal of Democracy essay “How Viktor Orbán Wins.”
The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what strategy they…
The great achievements of Hungary’s 1989–90 transition—including democracy, rule of law, market-oriented reform, and pluralism in intellectual life—are being dismantled as the world looks the other way.
